Richard Price

Books On Books Collection – Richard Price & Ronald King

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little but often (2007)

little but often: a pop-up alphabet love poem (2007)
Richard Price (text), Ronald King (design)
Dos-à-dos accordion book. H165 x W110 mm, 28 double-panel spreads. Edition of 350. Acquired from the artist, 6 October 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Richard Price’s lines recall the inventiveness of Emily Dickinson‘s and compression of Samuel Menashe‘s. For Dickinson, we have the artistry of Jen Bervin; for Menashe, we have that of Julie Johnstone; and for Price, we have his full-on collaboration with Ron King.

Harking back to The Half-Year Letters (1983), little but often pairs King’s lowercase pop-up alphabet with Price’s verses, just as its predecessor paired the uppercase with Roy Fisher‘s alphabet-inspired evocations of the 26 weeks from April through September. Also like its predecessor, little but often plays on the 52 weeks of the year, this time with its front and back covers illustrated with a playing-card suit of hearts, “numbered” a-m and n-z, and with two pages allotted to each week, each letter and each brief poem — as the title says, little but often. While The Half-Year Letters explores the forward movement of the letters alongside the movement of the year, this is love poetry in a book of back and forth. Text and design converse — and not merely by the letter.

The last letter and lines in the book exemplify this to perfection.

Of the few other pairs of couplets in the book, none is as back and forth as the letter z’s. Paired against one another, rhyming ab ab, each line beginning alike with its N-z phrase, the two couplets echo the back-to-backness and balance of the dos-à-dos structure. The phrases self-righteous space and tender absence can be read as allusions to the cut-out space around the letters. Or vice versa. Again, back and forth. “Angry” and “tender” bat each other back and forth, just as the final phrase turns the dos-à-dos sweetly back on itself.

Together, Price and King make the concertina book “smile brighter”.†

Further Reading

“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. 31 March 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Ronald King“. 1 March 2021. Books On Books Collection.

Clark, Caroline. 23 January 2013. “Clark on Price“. Eyewear, the blog.

†Dante Alighieri. 1320. Purgatorio (Canto XI, 82). Hollander, Robert, Stephen Campbell, and Simone Marchesi. 1988. Dartmouth Dante project. When Dante meets and praises the illuminator Oderisi da Gubbio in purgatory, Oderisi directs the praise to his pupil Franco Bolognese as the one who really made “the pages smile brighter”.

Price, Richard. 2018. Digital. Essence Press. Collaboration with Julie Johnstone.

___________. 2008. folded. Essence Press. Collaboration with Julie Johnstone.

Wheatley, David. 31 October 2009. “Rays by Richard Price and The Hundred Thousand Places by Thomas A Clark“. The Guardian.

Bookmarking Book Art – The British Library’s “Artists’ Books Now” series

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Recent exhibition of art from Oliver Jeffers’ and Sam Winston’s A Child of Books. The British Library.

Richard Price and his team at The British Library just concluded their fifth event in this series of “show and tell” talks by book artists. Most of the events have staked a claim to some relationship with a British Library event or exhibition current at the time — World Book Night, Writing: Making your Mark, and Buddhism — but the title of this fifth event punningly encapsulates the real point of the entire series: “Contemplating: Artist’s Books Now”.

When picturing an artist’s book what do you imagine?  Intricate design, ornate bindings, blank space, fold outs and pop-up rinsed through with vibrancy of text and colour. Is it something more unearthly and harder to describe? An air of peace in the topsy-turvy hullabaloo of our modern world.  A pause of contemplation as a work speaks to you? Or, on the contrary, is it a space of immense energy, of ‘thought-provocation’, where contemplation is something you feel compelled to do to make sense of the sensations and ideas the book stimulates? “Contemplating: Artists’ Books Now”

Whether the organizing theme has been “here and now” “place”, “Latin America“, “writing” or “contemplation”, the evening inevitably turns to reflecting on the nature of book art, bookworks, the artist’s book, the book arts, bookness and even art itself. Even with 50-60 in the audience and four to six presentations, Price and team have arranged the agenda to allow for hands-on “viewing” of the works, conversations with the artists and question time that evolves into a room-wide conversation, not just Q&A.

So far, the team — consisting of book artists and researchers Egidija Čiricaitė and Sophie Loss and the librarians Jeremy Jenkins and Richard Price — has attracted a consistently eclectic, talented and insightful set of artists, collectors, curators, librarians, academics and moderators for each event. To name but a few: Danny Aldred, Lucy Bell, Tracey Bush, Nancy Campbell, Maria Fusco, John McDowall, Gill Partington, Caroline Penn, Clive Phillpot, Francisca Prieto, Chris Taylor, Michael Wellen, Maria White and Sam Winston.

One wishes for Artists’ Books Now once a month! Not to detract from the efforts and energy of the team, but how hard and wonderful would it be to coordinate a future series of Artists’ Books Now to coincide the weeks before or after Bristol’s Book Artists Event, Edinburgh’s Artists’ BookMarket, Liverpool’s Artists’ Book Fair, Leeds‘ International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair, Norwich’s Turn the Page and Sheffield’s revived Artists’ Book Fair?